The list below was born out of some pretty serious arguments. Was Bruce Springsteen better in 1975 or 1978? When did Kanye hit his stride? Which was more awesome, “The Joshua Tree” or “Zoo TV”? The concerts and tours that made the final cut weren’t just huge spectacles, they deepened the power of rock & roll itself – from Neil Young thrashing out 20-minute jams with Crazy Horse to Beyoncé turning stadium glitz into a personal outpouring. “You’re almost levitating on the energy from the audience,” says Keith Richards. “And I miss it when I’m not doing it.” Here are the people who’ve done it best.

The Jimi Hendrix Experience Worldwide Tour

Jimi Hendrix’s 1967 debut album, Are You
Experienced, established his genius. The 200-some shows he played to
support the album assured his legend. Backed by his ecstatically indulgent
English rhythm section – bassist Noel Redding and drummer Mitch Mitchell –
Hendrix did nothing short of liberate the electric guitar, turning each show
into a pyrotechnic exploration. “I thought, ‘My God, this is like Buddy
Guy on acid,’ ” Eric Clapton later recalled. For the U.S., the coming-out
party was the Monterey Pop Festival, where Hendrix set his guitar ablaze,
terrifying the fire marshal while leaving the crowd spellbound. As the
Experience toured that year, they played alongside Pink Floyd and Cat Stevens
in every type of venue, from theaters to biker bars. “We also did a
graduation ball in Paris in March 1967, a really plush place,” Mitchell
recalled. “There was an oompah band on before us, and they would not leave
the stage. I remember one of our roadies, in a final act of desperation,
pushing the trombonist’s slide back into his mouth – blood and teeth
everywhere.” When the shows went right, however, Hendrix was a tour de
force. His sense of showmanship went back to his years as a sideman with Little
Richard; dressed in radiant psychedelic frills, he banged the neck of his
guitar, bit its strings and played it behind his head. “With Jimi, it was
a theater piece,” Soft Machine drummer and onetime Hendrix tourmate Robert
Wyatt once observed. “The drama, the pace, the buildups and drops.”
The peak Summer of Love moment came in early June, when the Experience played
London. With the Beatles in the crowd, Hendrix opened with the title track fromSgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, which had been released just two
days earlier. “1967 was the best year of my life,” he declared later.
“I just wanted to play and play.” Kory
Grow

James Brown at Boston Garden

On April 4th, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis. In the aftermath, America burned. There were riots in Washington, D.C.; Baltimore; Chicago; Kansas City, Missouri; and other cities. In Boston, city leaders expected more violence to come. Amid this tension, James Brown, the most explosive African-American musician of the era, pulled off a miracle. Brown and his band were booked to play Boston Garden on April 5th. The city considered canceling all public events that night, but the concert’s promoter, local City Councilman Thomas Atkins, convinced Mayor Kevin White that calling off a show of that magnitude might lead to even more anger and violence. “If [his] concert had not occurred,” recalled local radio DJ James “Early” Bird, “we would have had the biggest problem in the history of Boston since the Tea Party.”

Frustrating to Brown was the decision to televise the show, a way of keeping people out of the streets that would also drive down ticket sales. “But he had an obligation to honor Dr. King,” says Brown’s saxophonist and bandleader Pee Wee Ellis, and after Brown obtained the fee he wanted, everything was set.

“The show went on just as it had in all the other places we had played,” says trombone player Fred Wesley. “It was a regular show.” Of course, in 1968, the “regular show” meant a display of raw energy and dynamic power unlike anything else in music. Dressed in a black suit, hair in a tight pompadour, Brown moved with lightning quickness, his screams rattling the rafters, as he drove the band through his hits. They did “I Got You (I Feel Good)” in a double-time blur, and “Cold Sweat” featured an incredible solo showcase for “funky drummer” Clyde Stubblefield.

Still, Wesley, who had only recently become a part of Brown’s band, remembers a palpable sense of fear among the band members, and tension in the arena: “We didn’t know if there was a war against black people, or if a race war was happening. As we got to the stage, we were still wary about what might happen.”

But what ended up impressing him most was what amazed him about James Brown every night: his ability to hold and command a crowd. As the set reached its climax during Brown’s dramatic “cape act,” young fans began rushing the stage, and white police officers ran in to restore order. Shoving ensued, and the moment of mayhem many had anticipated seemed to have finally arrived.

But Brown quickly interceded. “You’re not being fair to yourself and me or your race,” he told the crowd. “Now, are we together, or we ain’t?” Turning to Stubblefield, he ordered, “Hit the thing, man,” and the band launched into a furious version of “I Can’t Stand Myself (When You Touch Me).” Brown was even joined onstage by Mayor White, whom he announced as a “swinging cat.” Brown exited the stage shaking hands with the people up front, as much like a political leader as a soul star.

In the weeks to come, requests for Brown to appear
elsewhere poured in, including one to travel to Washington, D.C., to speak to
rioters. In August that year, he’d release his monumental message record, “Say
It Loud – I’m Black and I’m Proud.” “I was able to speak to the
country during the crisis,” he later said, “and that was one of the
things that meant the most to me.” Almost 50 years later, Ellis is still
moved by the moment. “I’m proud to have been part of that,” he says. “I’m
pleased that it came off the way that it did.” Jon Dolan

Big Brother and the Holding Company American Tour

Like so much of Janis Joplin’s career, the tour to
support Cheap Thrills, her 1968 album with Big Brother and the Holding
­Company, was a triumph wrought from chaos. On the eve of the tour, the ­singer
announced she was leaving the band, leading to screaming fights with some of
the musicians. Yet that very tension – combined with grueling album sessions
that tightened what, as drummer Dave Getz admits, “wasn’t a tight band”
– made for a riveting farewell. The combination of her wild-child rasp and Big
Brother’s wailing blues rock proved transformative. “By the end of ’68,”
says Getz, “I don’t think there was a singer in rock & roll who could
touch her.” David Browne

Elvis Comeback Special

“Elvis was hardly ever nervous,” says drummer D.J. Fontana, remembering the NBC special that relaunched Presley’s career after years in Hollywood. “But he was then.” The highlight: an intimate sit-down set with his band, Fontana and guitarist Scotty Moore, that was almost like catching Elvis at the Louisiana Hayride back in 1954. “Performing with Elvis was amazing,” remembers Darlene Love, who sang backup for Presley on the show, “because we didn’t really know what to expect from him.” K.G.

Cream Farewell Tour

Eric Clapton ended Cream in 1968 after only two years, burned out and sick of keeping the peace between bandmates Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce. But even as they were breaking up, Cream pushed the boundaries. “It had nothing to do with lyrics or ideas,” said Clapton. “It was much deeper, purely musical.” At Madison Square Garden, they played a wild, nearly 20-minute “Spoonful.” At San Francisco’s Fillmore, they played under the venue’s psychedelic light shows as Clapton, Baker and Bruce soloed simultaneously. As Roger Waters, who saw them at the time, put it, “It was an astounding sight and an explosive sound.” K.G.

Johnny Cash at San Quentin Prison

“I remember walking through two sets of iron gates, and when I heard them close, I thought, ‘Man, I hope we get back out of here,’ ” Johnny Cash’s guitarist Bob Wootton recalls of his visit to San Quentin prison on February 24th, 1969. San Quentin was (and remains) California’s oldest prison, as well as the largest death-row facility in the country.

That day, as Cash stood onstage in his usual black suit, he was greeted by a sight that might have frightened a different performer: 2,000 hollering, charged-up inmates. But Cash, who always felt a special connection to prisoners, seemed to realize the gravity of the moment. “John was very solemn that day,” Wootton says. “We all were. It reminds you how much you take for granted. John connected with [the prisoners] in a way I never saw him connect with another audience.”

Cash had played prisons before – including an earlier San Quentin gig and, famously, California’s Folsom Prison. His show at San Quentin in 1969 was a full-on revue featuring the Carter Family, the Statler Brothers and Carl Perkins, and was shot for British TV. He performed with steely intensity, when he wasn’t cracking jokes to his audience. In a sense, he became one of them.

Cash treated his set list more as a guide than as a hard-and-fast program, but ended up catering to the inmates with songs like “Starkville City Jail” and Bob Dylan’s “Wanted Man.” Cash also wrote a song for the occasion – the twangy, brooding “San Quentin.” Its first line – “San Quentin, you’ve been livin’ hell to me” – prompted hooting and cheering from the crowd. “One more time!” they called out. “All right,” Cash said. “Hey, before we do it, though, if any of the guards are still speakin’ to me, can I have a glass of water?” The crowd laughed, then booed the guard.

One of the show’s standout moments was “A Boy Named Sue,” which made its world premiere before everyone in the prison, including the band. “I didn’t even know he had the song,” drummer W.S. Holland says with a laugh. “Back then, we didn’t have monitors and couldn’t hear all that much onstage. John just started doing it. The first time I actually heard the song was [later] in the studio.”

“A Boy Named Sue” became a Number One country single and crossed over to the pop charts, clearing a path for greater success, much to Cash’s amusement. “I’ve always thought it was ironic that it was a prison concert, with me and the convicts getting along just as fellow rebels, outsiders and miscreants should,” he wrote in his 1997 autobiography, “that pumped up my marketability to the point where ABC thought I was respectable enough to have a weekly network TV show.” K.G.

Ike and Tina Turner American Tour

The Rolling Stones’ return to America in 1969, after three years away – a period that included Beggars Banquet and the death of guitarist Brian Jones – was what critic Robert Christgau described as “history’s first mythic rock & roll tour.” But on the 17-date spin through the States, time and again they were upstaged by their handpicked opening act, old friends Ike and Tina Turner and their combustible R&B revue.

The Stones met Ike and Tina among Phil Spector’s orbit in England. “I’d always see Mick in the wings,” Tina remembered of performances in the mid-Sixties. “I’d come out and watch him occasion­ally; they’d play music and Mick would beat the tambourine. He wasn’t dancing. And lo and behold, when he came to America, he was doing everything!” Jagger later admitted he “learned a lot of things from Tina.”

In the U.S., Ike and Tina won over a new audience with wild, sweat-drenched covers of the new rock & roll canon, including a brassy burst through the Beatles’ “Come To­gether” (“I said to Ike,” recalled Tina, “ ’Please, please let me do that song onstage’ ”). They spun through Janis Joplin’s “Piece of My Heart” and a high-octane version of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Proud Mary” that, by 1971, would become their biggest hit. Their take on Otis Redding’s “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” garnered its share of attention too, thanks to an orgasmic bridge that eventually got even raunchier. “I don’t think it can go any further,” Tina said in 1971, “because, as they say in New York, it’s getting porn­ographic.”

At Madison Square Garden, Jop­lin herself stopped by
to assist on “Land of 1,000 Dances.” By the tour’s end, writers
couldn’t control their enthusiasm. “Vogue said it best,” said Tina. “ ’They came to see Mick Jagger, but they saw Ike and
Tina, and they’ve been comin’ ever since.'” Christopher R. Weingarten

Led Zeppelin World Tour

Before the private planes, mountains of cocaine and allegations of black magic, Led Zeppelin were four blokes tearing a path through America for the first time. They hit the U.S. in late December 1968, just before their debut LP hit shelves. “I remember pulling up to a theater and the marquee said, ‘Vanilla Fudge, Taj Mahal and support,’ ” Robert Plant said in 2005. “I thought, ‘Wow, here we are: support!’ ”

Everyone knew their name soon enough. A month in, they
unleashed a four-hour set at the Boston Tea Party. “We’d played our usual
one-hour set, using all the material from the first album,” John Paul
Jones said. “The audience just wouldn’t let us offstage.” Over 168
shows that year, as they unveiled new songs like “Whole Lotta Love,”
Zep’s live fury and future promise came into view. “This group could
become one of the biggest bands in history,” Jones said. “I hope we
don’t blow it.” Andy Greene

Black Sabbath American Tour

When Black Sabbath landed at JFK Airport for their first U.S. tour, Ozzy Osbourne scrawled “Satanist” as his religion on the immigration form. Many who saw their shows – opening for the Faces, Alice Cooper and the James Gang – didn’t know what to make of the shaggy Brits. A turning point came at New York’s Fillmore East. “I tore my floor tom off the riser and threw it at the audience,” says drummer Bill Ward. “I was like, ‘Fucking move! Do something!’ Soon everyone was headbanging.” Relentless touring in Europe had turned Sabbath into a brutal assault force. “It was primal,” says Ward of the tour. “There’s a lower self that went onstage, and it was just dynamite.” A.G.

The Who at the University of Leeds

After 1969’s rock opera Tommy, the Who wanted to return to their raw roots with a live album. Pete Townshend hated the recordings they made on their U.S. tour so much he threw them onto a bonfire. But everything clicked back home in England, in front of 2,000 ravenous fans at the University of Leeds, where the band tore through 38 songs, including a nearly 15-minute “My Generation.” Townshend later called it “the greatest audience we’ve ever played to.” A.G.

Neil Young and Crazy Horse Winter American Tour

In early 1970, Neil Young had finally become a star thanks to the huge success of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. During a quick break from that band and from recording his third solo LP, After the Gold Rush, Young decided to introduce his new fans to his other band, Crazy Horse – whose garage-rock thrash sounded the complete opposite of CSNY – on a run of clubs, theaters and the occasional junior-college auditorium. “When Neil plays with Crazy Horse, he goes into this other place and plays deep from inside,” says drummer Ralph Molina. “He becomes Neil Young, the real Neil Young.”

It was a sound no one had heard before. While other early jam bands like the Allman Brothers played with virtuosic professionalism, Crazy Horse produced raw chaos. Each night began with a brief solo acoustic set before Crazy Horse came onstage. Songs like “Down by the River” and “Cowgirl in the Sand” sometimes stretched to nearly 20 minutes, Young trading unhinged solos with guitarist Danny Whitten. “Danny had a strong musical presence, probably just as strong as Neil,” says bassist Billy Talbot. “We started doing songs longer, which Neil had never done before.”

In March, Bill Graham booked them at the Fillmore East for four shows in two nights, where they shared a bill with Miles Davis and the Steve Miller Band. Each night, Whitten sang “Come on Baby Let’s Go Downtown,” a song about scoring heroin, which he’d started using heavily around this time. One night backstage, Young wrote down the phrase “I’ve seen the needle and the damage done” on a sheet of paper. Within two years, Whitten was dead, and Young’s song about him, “The Needle and the Damage Done,” would appear on Harvest, the best-selling album of 1972. “It was such a loss,” said Young. “[It taught me] you can’t count on things. You just can’t take things for granted. Anything could go at any time.” A.G.

Elton John at the Troubadour

When Elton John took the stage at Los Angeles’ Troubadour for the first night of his six-date residency, he was a little-known 23-year-old pop singer with thick glasses and greasy hair who had only recently changed his name from Reginald Kenneth Dwight. When the show was over, Elton was a sensation. The stakes couldn’t have been higher: His debut LP, which had come out that spring, wasn’t selling. After what he called a “crisis meeting” with his label, it sent him to the States. The label made sure to pack the 300-capacity club with big names like David Crosby, Graham Nash and Mike Love of the Beach Boys. “The second night, Leon Russell was in the front row, but I didn’t see him until the last number,” Elton recalled. “Thank God I didn’t, because at that time I slept and drank Leon Russell.”

Neil Diamond introduced Elton. “I’m like the rest of you,” he said. “I’m here because of having listened to Elton John’s album.”

But those who had heard his album had no idea what they were in for: a poetic singer-songwriter with the flamboyance of a rock star. Album tracks like “Take Me to the Pilot” and “Sixty Years On” were played with a punk-like energy, Elton falling to his knees like Jerry Lee Lewis and knocking the piano bench over. The set also mixed in standards like “Great Balls of Fire” and “Honky Tonk Women.” And the rapturous reception he received encouraged him to experiment with even more adventurous stagecraft. “He seemed like a very quiet, subdued person,” says drummer Nigel Olsson. “All of a sudden, in front of an American audience, he started wearing Mickey Mouse ears and jumping up and down. That’s where all the strange gear started.” Unlike Elton’s debut album, which was packed with lush strings, harp and a synthesizer, he performed that night accompanied only by Olsson and bassist Dee Murray. “We just made a lot of noise,” Murray told Rolling Stone in 1987. “It was new. Elton was experimenting. Plus, we had to make up for the orchestra. We just socked it to them.”

Elton played five more nights as word started to spread around town: “His music is so staggeringly original,” Los Angeles Times music critic Robert Hilburn wrote. In the coming weeks, “Your Song” began climbing the charts, eventually hitting Number Eight in January 1971.

Forty-seven
years later, Elton still looks back fondly on that first trip to America. “It
was just all systems go,” he says. “Nothing was impossible. You’re
working on adrenaline and the sheer fact that you’re a success. I still love
what I do, and I’m 70 years old. I love it even more.” A.G.

Aretha Franklin at the Fillmore West

When promoter Bill Graham booked the
Queen of Soul for his San Francisco venue for three nights in March 1971, no
one was certain the matchup would work, including Aretha Franklin herself. “I
wasn’t sure how the hippies reacted to me,” she said. As Franklin’s
drummer Bernard Purdie recalls, “She’d been doing what you’d call
Vegas-type shows. But this was a whole different audience.” No one needed
to worry. With saxman King Curtis leading a band that included Billy Preston on
organ, Franklin remade pop and rock classics in her own image – turning Simon
and Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water” into call-and-response
gospel and reworking “Eleanor Rigby” as a funky stomp. The weekend of
shows (portions of which were released a few months later as Live at Fillmore West) had an appropriately glorious finale: On the last
night, Franklin pulled Ray Charles out of the crowd. Though they’d just met
that day, the two traded piano and vocal parts on an epic 19-minute version of “Spirit in the
Dark.” “She turned the thing into church,” Charles said later. “I
mean, she’s on fire.”D.B.

B.B. King at the Cook County Jail

B.B. King was playing a regular club gig on Chicago’s Rush Street in the late Sixties when he was invited to do a show at the local Cook County Jail. “I knew the inmates would enjoy it,” said warden Clarence English. “And that would be something they’d be beholden to us … If you give extra ice cream or let them stay up late at night, [they] don’t fight and destroy each other.”

King’s new manager, Sid Seidenberg – who was helping King score a career resurgence by booking him at venues like the Fillmore West – saw an opportunity. He told King to take the gig, and invited press and a recording engineer for a future live album (Johnny Cash had released the successful At Folsom Prison two years earlier). But what began as a commercial move became something much deeper. “I couldn’t help but feel the oppression,” King said later. “My heart was heavy with feeling for the guys behind bars.” With a full big band behind him, King belted burning takes on “Every Day I Have the Blues” and “How Blue Can You Get?” with a fury the loud assembly evidently connected with. The inmates booed when he took the stage, but by the end they were hypnotized. The show was released on 1971’s Live at Cook County Jail, a document of an electric-blues master at the top of his game. “There were tears in people’s eyes,” English recalled. “In mine, too.” Will Hermes

The Allman Brothers at the Fillmore East

The Allmans were still young, hungry Georgia rockers when they booked three nights at Bill Graham’s Fillmore East in New York in early 1971 with the idea of recording a live album. “My brother always believed a live album was what the Brothers needed to do, and the record company finally agreed,” Gregg Allman recalled. “The Fillmore was just the logical choice. I don’t think we even discussed another venue.” The LP they made there, At Fillmore East, became their defining statement.

The
Allmans were initially slotted into a bill headlined by Johnny Winter. But they
came out guns blazing the first night, and when the hall emptied out after
their set, they were promoted to headliner. With the band order duly shuffled,
the Allmans had time to stretch out on spectacular journeys – “On those
long jams, you climbed in and there was no tomorrow, no yesterday,” said
drummer Butch Trucks. The gigs were hardly trouble-free. On the last night, a
bomb scare delayed the start of the second show until the wee hours (“Good
mornin’, everybody!” someone announced before “Statesboro Blues”).
That early-a.m. set ended up becoming the keeper: “Whipping Post”
sprawled over gorgeous melodic terrain for 23 minutes; “Mountain Jam”
ascended for more than a half-hour. Atlantic Records engineer Tom Dowd oversaw
the taping; unlike most live albums, nothing needed to be redone in the studio
besides a few vocal overdubs. The LP went gold on October 25th, four days
before guitarist Duane Allman died in a motorcycle accident. “It’s the
best-sounding live album ever,” said the Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach. “It’s
just fuckin’ awesome.” W.H.

The Band at the Academy of Music

The Band’s 1978 farewell movie, The Last Waltz, is the greatest concert film of all time. But even that performance didn’t reach the heights of the Band’s four-night stand at New York’s Academy of Music at the end of 1971. The shows, which were released as a box set in 2013, captured the Band at their tightest and funkiest, injecting New Orleans R&B swagger into their harmonious folk rock. It was a period of high morale and expert musicianship for the sometimes volatile group, the result of a decade of hard touring, with Ronnie Hawkins, Bob Dylan and finally on their own. “There was a spell that everybody was doing really, really good,” the Band’s Robbie Robertson told Rolling Stone in 2013. “It was a roll of the dice after that. You just didn’t know what condition somebody was going to show up in.”

It was a moment the Band needed. Three years on from their groundbreaking debut, Music From Big Pink, their two most recent studio albums, Stage Fright and Cahoots,had been greeted with lukewarm reviews. Aiming for some fresh energy, Robertson re cruited veteran New Orleans band lead er Allen Toussaint to put together a horn section for their holi day gigs at the Academy of Music. It almost didn’t work out. To everyone’s horror, Toussaint’s briefcase full of horn arrangements was stolen on his way from New Orleans to the band’s Woodstock headquarters, where he was forced to rewrite the charts from memory. He wrote them in the wrong keys, and the Band had to relearn their songs in entirely new keys. Robertson recalled thinking, “We’re doomed.”

That anxiety lifted when they took the stage. “A chill ran through me,” Robertson said. “I thought, ‘OK, I’m feeling some magic in the air here. …’ As soon as we kicked off the first song,” he added, “we weren’t even touching the ground.”

The group set the tone with a taut, funky cover of Marvin Gaye’s “Don’t Do It,” and gracefully moved through its canon. The Band played with intensified warmth on “Unfaithful Servant” and “Get Up Jake” and jittery energy on deep album cuts like “Smoke Signal.” “We only did it once or twice,” said Robertson. “Levon [Helm] did an amazing job on it.” They turned “Chest Fever” and “Rag Mama Rag” into the stuff of a Crescent City street party, and returned to their roadhouse roots on Chuck Willis’ 1958 deep cut “(I Don’t Want to) Hang Up My Rock & Roll Shoes.”

The Band saved their biggest surprise for last. During their New Year’s Eve encore, they invited out their old friend Dylan, who had been out of the spotlight for years. Looking like his mid-Sixties self with aviators and a Telecaster, Dylan howled fiery takes of “Like a Rolling Stone” and “Don’t Ya Tell Henry,” pausing only to talk through the arrangements. “We were being a little bit bold,” said Robertson. (The horns didn’t accompany Dylan, though: “He looked over and saw us, jumped back from the microphone and glared over his shades,” says tuba player Howard Johnson. “I told everyone, ‘OK, let’s just get offstage.'”)

Months
later, highlights of those shows comprised the dazzling live double LP Rock
of Ages, which critics immediately called one of the best live albums of
the Seventies. For drummer Helm, it was simply “the most fun I ever had
making a Band record.” D.B.

The Rolling Stones North American Tour

Mick Jagger has a clear memory of being onstage in the summer of 1972, singing “Love in Vain,” the Robert Johnson song the Rolling Stones had recently reworked into a soul ballad. Jagger still marvels at the live version – particularly Mick Taylor’s searing lead guitar, which slowly took over the song and culminated in a minute and a half of mournful, melodic virtuosity. “He was playing beautifully at this point,” says Jagger. “It was chilling. It was so sad and haunting. And the horns were really just subtly there. The beats and stops were usually perfect. That was one of my favorites.”

The Rolling Stones were at the peak of their powers in the summer of 1972: Keith Richards was playing the most fearless rhythm guitar of his career; Taylor stretched out their music to improbable peaks; and Jagger stalked the stage, whipping his belt and perfecting his ability to turn music, as critic Robert Greenfield observed, into a psychodrama.

It was the band’s first North American tour since Altamont, the disastrous, deadly California festival in December 1969. Shaken by that debacle and the death of Brian Jones, the band hunkered down in the studio, recording three masterpieces: 1969’s Let It Bleed, 1971’s Sticky Fingers and 1972’s Exile on Main Street. Their Sixties peers – the Beatles, Bob Dylan – were less prolific, withdrawing from public view. In their absence, the Stones had only grown in stature. “After 10 years of playing together, the Stones had somehow become the number-one attraction in the world,” Greenfield wrote in his chronicle of the tour, A Journey Through America With the Rolling Stones. “The only great band of the Sixties still around in original form playing original rock & roll … They were royalty.”

Both Jagger and Richards remember the excitement they felt ahead of the eight-week run. If the prospect of getting back on the road weren’t enough, the opening act on tour was a 22-year-old Stevie Wonder, whom Jagger made a habit of watching side-stage. “It was exciting, the feeling of anticipation – getting back in touch with what it is we did,” says Richards. Adds Jagger, “We were trying to get out of the studio, out of the South of France, and Keith had all these drug problems – so it was kind of good to get out on the road.”

The Stones’ office was overloaded with requests for tickets, priced at $6.50 (some fans sent in as many as 60 postcards each). A Dick Cavett TV special on the tour described the strange new phenomenon of scalping (plus the new concept of groupies). On opening night in Vancouver, 2,000 fans tried to force their way into the Pacific Coliseum, leaving 31 policemen injured – the first of several violent incidents. “That was in the day when people who didn’t have a ticket would show up,” says Jagger, “and be like, ‘OK, we’re here, we’re fucking going in.'”

Unlike the 1969 tour – which featured slow, slogging rhythms – the band played at breakneck speed. “Keith was doing that,” says Jagger. “I’m not trying to blame him for anything. He kept starting it.” Says Richards, “That was probably trying to catch up with lost time.” Songs like “Street Fighting Man” ran several minutes longer than the studio versions as the band ripped away. “We were probably searching for the ending,” Richards jokes.

For Richards, the highlight was playing the new songs from Exile on Main Street, recorded the previous summer. “Playing the Exile stuff for the first time was a real turn-on,” says Richards. After opening with “Brown Sugar,” the band tore through several Exile classics: “Rocks Off,” “Rip This Joint,” “Sweet Virginia.” Unlike later tours, Jagger hung around during Richards’ songs, howling away “Happy” into the same mic. “I always enjoyed doing that,” Richards says.

There were also a few throwbacks, including a horn-fueled version of “Satisfaction,” and “Bye Bye Johnny,” a Chuck Berry song that the Stones had been doing since 1963. According to Richards, they picked the deep cut for its rhythm: “There’s an interesting reverse beat going on that always intrigued us.”

On the road, the Stones encountered an older audience – one that ranged from about age 15 to 30. “There always used to be screamers, and they didn’t seem to worry much about the music,” Bill Wyman told Cavett. As a result, the band played with more focus. It helped that arena sound had improved: “Now you hear everything and you see everything, and there’s so much tension,” said Wyman.

For all the onstage professionalism, the backstage scene was as wild as any rock & roll tour before or since. The band traveled with the largest entourage in rock history up to that point – including a physician, label president Marshall Chess and a press corps Richards compared to a political campaign. The press included photographer Annie Leibovitz, and authors Terry Southern, Robert Greenfield and Truman Capote, who reluctantly joined for a Rolling Stone cover story. “For him, it was a social occasion,” says Jagger, who recalls Capote saying he hated the fact that Jagger wore the same clothes every night. “He would’ve liked it better now – I have such a bigger wardrobe.” (Capote never wrote his piece, claiming it “didn’t interest me creatively.”)

Jagger admits that the traveling party was “a bit distracting.” He had to watch his drug intake in order to perform. “I wasn’t on meth, out of my mind or anything,” Jagger says. “But I was having a lot of fun.” Richards’ favorite story “has got to be Bobby Keys and me nearly burning down the Playboy mansion,” he says. Staying at Hugh Hefner’s home, Richards and saxophonist Keys accidentally set fire to one of the bathrooms. “We were going through a doctor’s bag and we knocked over a candle,” says Richards.

At the same time, Jagger remembers “all these dark moments” on the tour. On the morning of July 17th in Montreal, dynamite exploded beneath one of the band’s vans, destroying equipment. “It was kind of scary because it was during the separatist movement of Quebec,” says Jagger. “I mean, it wasn’t just some random guy trying to blow up a truck.” The show, remarkably, went on that night, but a riot ensued when 500 fans with counterfeit tickets were turned away.

The following day, the band flew to a small airport in Rhode Island. As the entourage cleared customs, Richards took a nap on the side of a parked firetruck. He woke up to the flashing lights of a local newspaper photographer. “I just reacted,” Richards says. “I got up and hit in the general direction of the light and busted the guy’s camera. Things escalated from there. Then the fucking FBI got involved.” The photographer claimed he was assaulted, and Richards and Jagger were arrested and placed in a jail cell, while an unruly audience at Boston Garden waited. Fearing a riot, Boston Mayor Kevin White organized their release, and the band took the stage after midnight. “There was never a dull moment,” says Richards.

The offstage chaos was documented by the legendary photographer Robert Frank, who brought along a camera for a documentary that, as Jagger understood, would be “about playing and about music.” Instead, Cocksucker Blues was a cinéma vérité experiment full of lurid scenes: naked groupies having sex on an airplane, Jagger snorting cocaine, and groupie heroin use. The band blocked its release (though it became a popular bootleg). “[Robert] would initiate things,” says Jagger. “Most documentary filmmakers kind of get you to do things that you perhaps wouldn’t do if they weren’t there.” Jagger cites the famous scene where Richards and Keys threw a TV out of a Hyatt Hotel window: “Robert would probably say to Keith, ‘Keith, throw the TV out the window.’ They probably weren’t going to do that that morning.” But Richards disagrees. “Bobby Keys and I engineered that,” he says. “We called the cameraman ’round when we dismantled the TV. So that scene was directed by Bobby Keys and Keith fucking Richards.”

The tour wrapped with four shows at Madison Square Garden. Though the Stones had played 48 shows in only 54 days, they didn’t hold back. The July 25th show featured a sentimental sing-along of “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” and perhaps the fiercest “All Down the Line” ever played. “You almost feel like you’re levitating on the energy from the audience,” says Richards. “It’s a strange experience.” The tour ended the following night, on Jagger’s 29th birthday. Wonder joined the band for a raucous medley of “Uptight (Everything’s Alright)” and a revved-up, horn-fueled take on “Satisfaction” (Wonder said he wrote “Uptight” with “Satisfaction” in mind). A cake was rolled onstage, and the show ended with a pie fight among bandmates. The afterparty, thrown by Ahmet Ertegun, included Muddy Waters, Bob Dylan and Zsa Zsa Gabor.

It
was the end of an era. Afterward, Richards slid further into addiction, and was
arrested on heroin and gun charges the next year. In 1974, after only five
years, Taylor left the band to go solo. The Stones’ next North American tour,
in 1975, featured stage props like a giant inflatable phallus, and little of
the ragged charm of the 1972 tour. “There were no sort of guidelines,”
Richards says. “You sort of made it up and you went along. It was a good
feeling, that tour. A bit frenetic and a little blurry, like an old movie, you
know? It was a bit jerky.” Patrick Doyle

David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars World Tour

“I wanted the music to look like it sounded,” said David Bowie, who reigned over the moon-age daydream of his greatest tour as a crimson-haired, sparkly, makeup-slathered rock & roll space god. The music, thanks to the savage elegance of the Spiders From Mars, was even wilder, with an intense symbiosis developing between Bowie and chunky-toned guitarist Mick Ronson. “There was magic there,” says keyboardist Mike Garson. Ziggymania broke out across the world, and even as Bowie moved on, it never really stopped. A.G.

Van Morrison North American Tour

It takes an extraordinary band to top the studio versions of songs like “Domino” and “Cyprus Avenue,” but with the 10-piece Caledonia Soul Orchestra, Van Morrison pulled it off night after night. With horns, strings and blazing jazz chops, the band was ready to “take the songs anywhere Van wanted to take them,” says guitarist John Platania. “Every performance of each song was different.” Morrison was, as usual, lost in the music, getting so into it that he gave himself backaches – the platform shoes he was favoring at the time probably didn’t help. He rarely addressed the crowd, and kept his band on its toes with subtle gestures that sparked dynamic shifts worthy of James Brown. “He had these signals behind his back,” says Platania. “He would flash his hand and spread his fingers out. We knew instantly we had to bring it down and then build it up again.” Morrison was stretching out, toying with his phrasing, elongating syllables like a jazz singer. The band ended when the tour did – but it lives on in Morrison’s It’s Too Late to Stop Now, one of the most essential live albums of all time, recently released in a gloriously extended version. “We were sad to see it end,” says Platania. “But in those days, he would say stuff like, ‘The show doesn’t have to go on.'” D.B.

Patti Smith Group and Television at CBGB

Over a two-month-long residency, the Patti Smith Group went from art project to formidable band – and lower Manhattan’s CBGB was well on the road to becoming one of the most famous rock clubs in the world. Much of the material that ended up on Smith’s debut, Horses, came to life at CB’s, with Smith improvising poetic chants as the band brutalized simple chord patterns. “CBGB was the ideal place to sound a clarion call,” Smith wrote. Television, meanwhile, had just begun emphasizing the guitar-weaving tapestries they would immortalize on Marquee Moon. Rock history was being made at a club with no dressing rooms and an incontinent dog in residence – and the musicians knew it. “I remember one night standing outside CBGB, in the doorway of the derelict hotel next door, smoking a joint,” says Patti Smith guitarist Lenny Kaye, “and realizing that this was the kind of gathering of psychic energies I’d always dreamed of when, say, I would read about the San Francisco scene in 1966.” W.H.

Bob Marley at the Lyceum Theatre, London

Bob Marley’s two concerts at the Lyceum Theatre in London in July 1975 were more than just musically transcendent shows: They were the triumphant peak of Marley’s first proper tour as a solo artist and would elevate him from cult act to international icon – in part thanks to Live!, a concert document from the shows that gave him his first international Top 40 hit, “No Woman, No Cry.”

“Lyceum
was magic,” recalls Marley’s friend Neville Garrick, the Wailers’ lighting
designer and art director at the time. “It was an old theater, so the
acoustics were proper. … They took out all the seats, and people were going
from the very first song.” Booked in a small room to drive up ticket
demand, the Lyceum shows sold out in a day, and roughly 3,000 ticketless
hopefuls mobbed the streets outside the venue on Marley’s first night there,
along with a phalanx of cops. Some fans nevertheless managed to tear the fire
doors off their hinges and rush in, packing the room tighter still, shoulder to
shoulder. It was so hot, condensation was dripping from the ceiling, and roof
hatches had to be opened to let air in. Marley appeared before the crowd like a
prophet in a denim work shirt, dreadlocks bobbing, and few moments in pop are
as spine-tingling as the opening of “No Woman, No Cry,” the audience
chanting the chorus like a hymn before Marley had even sung a word. Recalled
bassist Aston Barrett, “Everyone onstage [got] high from the feedback of
the people.” W.H.

Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue North American Tour

Bob Dylan could have played arenas when he toured to support 1976’s Desire. Instead, true to form, he did the unexpected: He booked tiny theaters with just days’ notice, charged less than $9 per ticket and took along a gaggle of friends – including Roger McGuinn, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and Joan Baez. Dylan had started hanging around his old West Village haunts with buddies from his folkie days, and he wanted to take that nostalgic spirit on the road. “We all sing and sing and sing and laugh until we pass out,” Baez told Rolling Stone. “For us, it makes no difference if we just play for 15 people or 15,000.” Backed by one of his best bands ever (including guitarist Mick Ronson), Dylan stretched out shows for as long as five hours – with help from McGuinn, Elliott and others, who would do their own sets and join his. New tracks from Desire were mixed with 1960s classics (“It Ain’t Me Babe,” “Just Like a Woman”) and covers (“Deportees”). The shows were full of raw, spontaneous intimacy: Dylan duetted with his ex-lover Baez, did scorched-earth versions of “Idiot Wind,” and pleaded for the release of jailed boxer Rubin “Hurricane” Carter. As Rolling Thunder participant Allen Ginsberg said, “Having gone through his changes … Bob now has his powers together.” A.G.

Grateful Dead North American Tour

“Our second coming,” says Grateful
Dead drummer Mickey Hart of the band’s 1977 North American tour. Everyone knew
the Dead could jam out infinitely. But that year they were discovering something
new: that tight, songful concision could transport a crowd just as easily. “We
had a lot of new songs and wanted to get at ’em,” says singer and
guitarist Bob Weir. “And the only way to get at the next song was to
finish the one you were doing.” Ironically for a band that had little use
or patience for studios, it would be recording sessions that strengthened its
live approach. Terrapin Station, the group’s most recent LP, was
recorded with Fleetwood Mac producer Keith Olsen, who’d helmed their
self-titled 1975 breakthrough; he forced the Dead to prep and rehearse more
than they ever had. “Going in with Keith and having him organize and arrange
all this stuff,” says Weir, “that gave us a solidity.” The
results of Olsen’s whip-cracking became clear as soon as the Dead went back on
the road – they tore into old favorites like “St. Stephen” and tried
new combinations, like going from the fast-paced “Scarlet Begonias”
into the churning “Fire on the Mountain,” and proved their newly honed
chops could help sculpt jams such as the 10-minute “Terrapin Station.”
“We felt like rock gods,” Weir says. It helped that the band was in
relatively good shape physically as well. “Jerry was healthy,” says
Hart. “That was a big thing.” The high point took place on May 8th at
Cornell University’s Barton Hall, regarded by Deadheads as the band’s greatest
show ever. In the end, the 1977 tour completely changed the Dead’s sense of
connection with fans, and their own musical purpose. “That was an era
where it started to creep up on us that people came to hear the songs,”
says Weir. “It finally dawned on us: ‘Oh, that’s what it’s all about.'” D.B.

The Ramones European Tour

The Ramones arrived in England with something to prove. The punk revolution had broken out in London in 1977, with the Sex Pistols getting wall-to-wall press and causing havoc. But no one in the nascent U.K. punk scene was ready for the precision-strike arrival of the Ramones. In his memoir, Johnny Ramone wrote that at a Pistols show on their first night in town in December ’77, “Johnny Rotten asked me what I thought of them, and I told him … they stunk.”

Three
days later, the Ramones unleashed a furious assault on the audience in Glasgow,
opening with “Rockaway Beach” and not taking a break until 26 songs
later. Playing to a punk-crazed English audience pushed the Ramones to play
their most intense shows. The tour wrapped on New Year’s Eve at the Rainbow
Theatre, their 148th show of the year. “Probably the best show the Ramones
ever did,” said Johnny. Amazingly, Joey had been singing through
incredible pain; he’d suffered third-degree burns on his neck when a makeshift
humidifier exploded on him. Said Ramones co-manager Linda Stein, “[Johnny]
came to me and said … ‘Put me in a wheelchair and get me on a plane before I go
insane.'” He wanted to be sedated. A.G.

The Eagles U.S. Tour

The career-defining two-year stretch of shows
that followed 1976’s Hotel California saw the Eagles become a stadium
band. Yet in an era in which rock shows were growing bigger and more
impersonal, the Eagles’ studio perfectionists, Don Henley and Glenn Frey, found
a way to recreate the feel and detail of their albums onstage, with every
harmony and guitar lick seamlessly in place decades before backing tapes and
Auto-Tune made that process easier. Hits like “Life in the Fast Lane”
and “Take It to the Limit” were given almost impossibly pristine
treatment. The tour itself was chaotic; at one point, bassist Randy Meisner and
Frey got into a fistfight when Frey called Meisner a “pussy.” But you
wouldn’t have known it watching their sets. “Some critic said we used to
go out onstage and loiter,” Henley said. “I think we accomplished a
great deal.” D.B.

Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band American Tour

It had been three very long years since Born to Run made Bruce Springsteen a national star. A bitter lawsuit filed against his former manager in 1976 left him legally unable to enter a studio for two years before making Darkness on the Edge of Town. “Prove It All Night,” his new single, stalled at Number 33 on the charts. Anything radio-friendly, like “Fire” and “Because the Night,” was held off Darkness to maintain the starker atmosphere Springsteen wanted for his set of songs about the reality of everyday working life. To many, all of this was evidence that Springsteen was in decline. So he did the thing he could do better than almost anyone alive: He went on tour. “With the burden of proving I wasn’t a has-been at 28,” he wrote in his 2016 memoir, Born to Run, “I headed out on the road performing long, sweat-drenched rock shows featuring the new album.”

Springsteen and the E Street Band played 115 shows across North America, the longest series of dates they would ever play in a single year. Even the soundchecks were grueling. “Literally, we would play ‘Thunder Road’ for a half-hour and Bruce would walk around and sit in every section and make sure the sound was as good as possible,” says drummer Max Weinberg. “Look, Bruce took his fun very seriously.” Not everyone thought it was so much fun. “I thought it was a little self-indulgent and a little bit silly,” says bassist Garry Tallent. “We would do four-hour sound-checks and then a three-and-a-half-hour show. We were younger then.”

Sets featured the majority of the new album, a big chunk of Born to Run and favorites off the first two discs, like “Spirit in the Night” and “Rosalita (Come Out Tonight).” After so much time off, the band played with a stunning mix of pent-up energy and technical precision. “Anyone can be great on any given night,” says Weinberg. “To really be great every night takes a lot of willpower, a lot of dedication, a lot of self-confidence, a lot of respect for your audience – tremendous respect for the audience.”

Live, the songs completely transformed from their recorded versions. For “Prove It All Night,” the band added a piano and guitar intro that built to a furious climax, and “Backstreets” developed an emotional spoken-word interlude about lost love that eventually morphed into “Drive All Night,” from The River. “Even at that point, the whole thing was ‘You have to see them live – you can’t go by the record,'” says Tallent.

As the tour crisscrossed the nation, with five shows getting broadcast on the radio and quickly hitting the bootleg market, a new respect for the album took hold. “Night after night, we sent our listeners away, back to the recorded versions of this music,” Springsteen wrote in Born to Run, “newly able to hear their beauty and restrained power.”

One particularly great show took place at the tiny Agora Ballroom in Cleveland. Opening with a ferocious cover of Eddie Cochran’s “Summertime Blues” and wrapping up three hours later with a wild “Twist and Shout,” it became one of the most coveted bootlegs in rock history. “It was really hot,” says Weinberg. “Just sweltering. It was incredibly exciting. Then you just get on the bus and go to the next gig. It was like that about five nights a week with two days off.”

Word of Springsteen’s glorious return prompted CBS Records to mount a huge billboard of his image on the Sunset Strip, advertising the album and tour but making no mention of the band. “It was the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen,” Springsteen told a radio DJ. One night, Springsteen snuck up to the roof of a nearby building with Tallent and saxophonist Clarence Clemons. Armed with cans of black spray paint, Springsteen hoisted himself onto Clemons’ massive shoulders and wrote “Prove It All Night E Street” across the entire thing. “We didn’t deface it,” says Tallent with a laugh. “We corrected it. That was our way of letting people know to not expect the next coming of Christ. It’s just a rock & roll show.”

Darkness on the Edge of Town still wasn’t a commercial hit by the end of the run, but critics across the country hailed the tour as the best of the year, and the album remained at the core of Springsteen’s set list for decades to come. “[They] are perhaps the purest distillation of what I wanted my rock & roll music to be about,” Springsteen wrote. “[On the last stand of the tour] an exploding firecracker tossed by an inebriated ‘fan’ opened up a small slash underneath my eye. A little blood’d been drawn, but we were back.” A.G.

The Clash North American Tour

They called it the Pearl Harbour Tour, and they opened each night with a slashing version of “I’m So Bored With the USA.” For an English punk band trying to break through in the States, it was an interesting marketing approach. “England’s becoming claustrophobic for us,” Joe Strummer told Rolling Stone. “I think touring America could be a new lease on life.” With a touring budget of just $30,000 from their record label (most of which they gave to opening act Bo Diddley), the Clash stormed the heartland and made converts wherever they went. During downtime on their tour bus, they watched a VHS copy of Star Wars over and over. They hit the Palladium in New York in February, blowing away a crowd that included Andy Warhol and Bruce Springsteen. “Every country has one thing in common, which is they all listen to shit music,” said co-leader Mick Jones. “We’re here to alleviate that.” A.G.

Pink Floyd ‘The Wall’ Tour

Pink Floyd’s 1979 rock opera, The Wall, was their most ambitious album to date, and when they took it on the road the next year they knew a traditional stage show would simply not do it justice. Pushing the limits of concert technology, they built an actual wall during the first half of every show, then played the bulk of the second half behind it, obscured from the audience. “Not much spontaneity,” said drummer Nick Mason, “but we’re not known for our duck-walking and gyrating around onstage.”

The logistics were so daunting that they staged it only 31 times across 16 months, hitting just four cities: Los Angeles; London; Dortmund, Germany; and Uniondale, New York. The most dramatic moment of the show happened near the end, when the wall came tumbling down. “The first couple of bricks would terrify people in the front rows,” said guitarist David Gilmour. “The audience would think they were going to be killed.” A.G.

Talking Heads ‘Speaking in Tongues’ Tour

It was an image that defined Talking Heads for a generation of music fans – skinny, nervous David Byrne on the Speaking in Tongues tour, struggling to dance in a cartoonishly huge white suit. “What I realized years before,” Byrne says, “is I had to find my own way of moving that wasn’t a white rock guy trying to imitate black people, or bring some other kind of received visual or choreographic language into pop music … I just thought, ‘No, no, you have to invent it from scratch.'”

Since forming in the mid-Seventies, Talking Heads had gone from CBGB New Wavers to one of the biggest bands in America. For the tour to support 1983’s Speaking in Tongues, their most popular album to date, they reinvented themselves, growing from a quartet to a nine-piece funk mob that included P-Funk keyboardist Bernie Worrell, Brothers Johnson guitarist Alex Weir and vocalist Lynn Mabry. Byrne also took cues from the experimental visual-art world, projecting abstract slides onto a spare backdrop, creating a stark aesthetic to match the band’s driving, uncluttered funk. The suit was inspired in part by Japanese Noh theater.

What emerged was arty dance-party transcendence. Byrne and drummer Chris Frantz recall the two-night run at New York’s Forest Hills Tennis Stadium in August as a highlight. “Madonna had just released her first record; she was walking around barefoot,” Frantz says. “I saw Mick Jagger and Jerry Hall off to the side of the stage – she was dancing, Mick wasn’t.” The Greek Theater in Berkeley the following month was a similar bacchanal. “We’d begun to get the Deadhead crowd,” Frantz says, laughing.

In late 1983, the band decided to document the tour with a concert film, and teamed up with director Jonathan Demme (who would later win an Oscar for The Silence of the Lambs). “We didn’t want any of the bullshit,” says Frantz of the band’s initial idea for Stop Making Sense. “We didn’t want the clichés. We didn’t want close-ups of people’s fingers while they’re doing a guitar solo. We wanted the camera to linger, so you could get to know the musicians a little bit.”

Shot over three nights at the Pantages Theater in Los Angeles, Stop Making Sense may be the greatest concert movie. It begins with Byrne walking onto a deserted stage with a boombox, setting it down, pressing “play,” then reimagining “Psycho Killer” for acoustic guitar and 808 drum-machine beats. His bandmates and backing musicians join him incrementally, song by song. “It’s cut down,” Byrne notes, comparing the film to the two-hour shows, “but there were no other substantial changes.”

The effect was so real, people actually got up and danced in movie theaters. “I’d never seen that before,” Frantz says. “Or since.” W.H.

Fela Kuti at Glastonbury

If anyone at the U.K.’s Glastonbury Festival didn’t already know Fela Kuti, they soon learned why he was one of the planet’s most electric artists. Before his biggest international crowd to date, Fela played big-band Afrobeat that owed as much to James Brown’s funk as to the high life of his native Nigeria. Fela managed just two songs in two hours – but the grooves were so intoxicating, no one minded. “The love the audience gave was fantastic,” recalls son Femi Kuti, who backed him on sax that day. He left a legend in his wake. W.H.

Prince ‘Purple Rain’ Tour

On each night of the Purple Rain tour,
Prince and the Revolution huddled backstage for a prayer. “It was a
meaningful ritual,” says bassist Mark Brown. “The crowds were so
loud, and it was so crazy, that we needed each other because that was the only
thing you had: each other for support.” With Prince’s movie Purple Raincatapulting the singer toward megastardom, the 98 shows he did in support
of the soundtrack album were like Broadway productions. Prince began the show
ascending from beneath the stage on a hydraulic lift, and went through five
costume changes. “He had all these visual cues,” recalls keyboardist
Lisa Coleman. “He’d throw a hankie into the air, and when the hankie hit
the ground, that’s when we would stop.” At the Los Angeles Forum, Bruce
Springsteen and Madonna joined Prince for the encore, which included a nearly
half-hour-long version of “Purple Rain.” “He wanted to tower
over everybody,” says keyboardist Matt Fink. “He was the Muhammad Ali
of rock.” D.B.

Run-DMC ‘Raising Hell’ Tour

“There was no concept of charts and no concept of airplay,” says LL Cool J, describing the landscape for Run-DMC’s 1986 tour, which featured LL, the Beastie Boys, Whodini and others as openers. That underground status changed two months into the tour, when Run-DMC had a breakout MTV hit with their Aerosmith collaboration “Walk This Way,” from their Raising Hell album. “Motherfuckers in the front row started looking like the Ramones and Cyndi Lauper,” says DMC of the new white fans who came to check out their shows. “We got a bunch of Madonnas asking for autographs.” DMC also noticed that cross-cultural appeal working the other way as a predominantly black audience embraced the tour’s beer-spraying opening act, the Beastie Boys, then months away from releasing their debut LP, Licensed to Ill. “The Beasties were crazy,” recalls rapper Ecstasy of Whodini. “They created an illusion that they were happy-go-lucky and careless, but they were on top of their shit. They were the white Run-DMC.” Competition among the artists was fierce. “I wanted to chain-saw the audience,” says LL Cool J, who was 18 years old at the time. Toward the end of the tour, a riot at a show in Long Beach, California, provided fuel for negative media coverage. But Raising Hell’s positive legacy is undeniable. As DMC says today, “When Obama first got elected, all my white friends said, ‘That’s because of what Run-DMC did.'” C.R.W.

Metallica Damaged Justice Tour

In 1988, Metallica released their pivotal album … And Justice for All and went from thrash-metal renegades to mainstream stars. But when their manager suggested an arena tour to support the LP, the band wasn’t convinced. “I was like, ‘Seriously?'” drummer Lars Ulrich recalls. “We knew we could do L.A., New York, San Francisco, but the American heartland didn’t seem like a great idea. No band as extreme as ours had ever done a full arena tour. So we used Indianapolis as a yardstick. If we were cool there, we were cool almost anywhere. When the tickets went on sale in Indianapolis, we ended up doing 13,000 or 14,000, which in 1988 was an insane victory.”

On
the Damaged Justice Tour, Metallica learned just how many authenticity-starved
headbangers were really out there. The band got the first taste of its
transformative power in the summer of 1988 when it was booked onto the Monsters
of Rock Tour, opening for Van Halen and Scorpions. At the L.A. Coliseum, fans
responded to Metallica’s set by flinging their folding chairs at the stage to
create a football-field-size mosh pit. “It was bonkers,” says bassist
Jason Newsted, who had recently joined the band, replacing the late Cliff
Burton. “For a kid coming off a farm and jumping into my favorite band, it
was very dreamy. I didn’t sleep. Every day was another dream coming true.”
He also got a lesson in how to conduct himself on the road. “I’d walk on
the crew bus of a big band and there’s a pile of blow on the table in the front
lounge,” Newsted recalls. “I look over there at my heroes, all red
and swollen, and I’m like, ‘Guess what I’m not gonna do? That!'” The
kickoff of the Damaged Justice Tour coincided with the success of Metallica’s
anti-war-themed video for their new single, “One,” which quickly became
an MTV hit. At the peak of bloated hair metal, Metallica were playing jagged
seven-to-nine-minute-long thrash odysseys. But the crowds at their shows kept
growing. “The kids know that at the end of the day there’s something very
real and honest about what we do,” Ulrich told Rolling Stone in 1989. “You can’t take that away from us.”K.G.

Madonna Blond Ambition Tour

As Madonna’s career was taking off in the mid-Eighties, most of her tours were relatively straightforward affairs, based around her singing and dancing. But for the stadium blowouts that supported her 1989 classic, Like a Prayer, she wanted to up her game. In the process, she reinvented the pop megatour itself. “I really put a lot of myself into it,” she said. “It’s much more theatrical than anything I’ve ever done.” That year, Madonna had caused a nationwide controversy with the video for “Like a Prayer,” which daringly mixed sexual and religious imagery. Blond Ambition extended that provocation and upped the spectacle.

The show opened with Madonna climbing down a staircase into a factory world inspired by German expressionist filmmaker Fritz Lang. She sang in a giant cathedral for “Like a Prayer” and under a beauty-shop hair dryer in “Material Girl.” And, most infamously, she simulated masturbation while wearing a cone-shaped bustier on a crimson bed during “Like a Virgin.” “The Blond Ambition Tour was what really catapulted her into the stratosphere,” says Vincent Paterson, the tour’s co-director and choreographer.

Madonna took a hands-on approach to the show, working with her brother, painter Christopher Ciccone, to design sets, and creating the costumes with fashion designer Jean Paul Gaultier. “I tried to make the show accommodate my own short attention span,” she said. “We put the songs together so there was an emotional arc in the show. I basically thought of vignettes for every song.”

Starting out in Japan in April 1990 and hitting the U.S. the following month, the tour grossed almost $63 million. But it didn’t go off without any complications: Madonna had to ditch the blond-ponytail hair extensions she wore early in the tour because they kept getting caught in her headset microphone. And in Toronto, the masturbation sequence almost got her and her dancers arrested in what became a bonding moment for her entire crew.

Madonna’s close relationship with her collaborators would be a major theme in the blockbuster 1991 tour documentary Truth or Dare, especially in memorable scenes where she invited her backup dancers into her bed. Today, Blond Ambition’s over-the-top intimacy is a staple of live pop music, from Lady Gaga to Miley Cyrus. In 1990, it was a revolution. “It was a kind of turning point,” says Darryl Jones, who played bass on the tour. “A lot of young girls were watching.” Steve Knopper

Public Enemy Sizzling Summer Tour

For the tour to support their groundbreaking LP Fear
of a Black Planet, Public Enemy wanted a show to match their music’s combative
assault. “OK, if we’re gonna fill a stage, everything’s gotta be moving,”
leader Chuck D recalls of the band’s approach. They’d built their live rep on
short, explosive sets. Now they packed an hour with Chuck as bullhorn MC and
Flava Flav as his firecracker comic foil, leaping across the stage and diving
into the crowd. In Houston, Ice Cube joined them to perform his guest verse on “Burn
Hollywood Burn,” a song that became each night’s incendiary high point. “We
didn’t need to use pyro,” says Chuck. “When I see acts use pyro, I’m
like, ‘What lazy fucks.'” C.R.W.

Sonic Youth and Nirvana European Tour

In the summer before they released Nevermind,Nirvana were still a largely unknown band. They booked a series of European
festival dates, opening for their friends Sonic Youth – and witnessed for the
first time their power to convert and ignite huge crowds. “It was
passionate. It was reckless,” says Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth, who also
astounded audiences with their New York noise-rock. “[Nirvana] were going
on at 2:00 in the afternoon, playing a 20-minute set. But there was this
massive amount of pogo’ing going on.” With drummer Dave Grohl on tour with
the band for the first time, and the new Nevermind material, Nirvana
were received almost like headliners. Kurt Cobain biographer Charles Cross
called it Cobain’s “happiest time as a musician.” Recalls Grohl, “Everything
was still very innocent.” A documentary of the tour, 1991: The Year
Punk Broke, captured Cobain spraying champagne all over a dressing room and
Grohl and bassist Krist Novoselic gleefully tearing through a backstage cheese
plate. The high point for Moore was in Brussels, where security tried to stop
Nirvana’s nightly ritual of smashing their gear, and Novoselic had to be pulled
down as he tried to climb up the closing stage curtains. “It was,”
says Moore, “the most perverse, deconstructed, psychedelic freakout
concert I’ve ever seen.” J.D.

U2 Zoo TV Tour

For its first tour of the Nineties, the biggest rock band in the world had one simple goal: to completely reinvent itself as a live act. U2 had just given their sound a full-scale makeover with 1991’s Achtung Baby – a groundbreaking fusion of rock, pop, electronic dance grooves and krautrock – and they needed a tour that reflected their sleek, challenging new music. “We were drawn to anything that was going to give us a chance to get away from the Joshua Tree earnestness,” said the Edge, “which had become so stifling.”

The notion of U2 as the inheritors of rock’s social mission had been central to their Eighties stardom. But as the band was well aware, it was increasingly out of step with an era defined by groups like Nirvana and Pearl Jam, who cast a skeptical eye at sweeping Joshua Tree–style rock heroism. For the Achtung Baby tour, U2 were ready to loosen up and throw a dance party, albeit a subversive one, packed with multimedia images that were a clear break from the stark purity of their Eighties stage sets. “The tour was being conceived at the same time as the album,” Bono recalled in 2005. “Zoo radio was a phenomenon before reality TV, with so-called shock jocks such as Howard Stern. It was aggressive, raw radio, the precursor to The Jerry Springer Show. The world was getting tired of fiction. … We wanted to make a tour that referenced this zoo/reality phenomenon.”

Extensive cable news coverage was a fact of life by the early Nineties; during the Gulf War, images of Scud missiles raining down on Iraq became dinnertime entertainment. U2 essentially turned the Zoo TV set into a postmodern art installation that reflected the numbing cacophony of the cable-TV era, playing in front of a mosaic of TV screens that mashed up war footage with old sitcoms, cooking shows and everything in between.

Bono, meanwhile, came up with a new, sly persona to match the new stage set. He donned an Elvis-style leather jacket, wraparound sunglasses and leather pants that evoked Jim Morrison. He took this rock star amalgamation and created a character called the Fly. “When I put on those glasses, anything goes,” Bono told Rolling Stone. “The character is just on the edge of lunacy. It’s megalomania and paranoia.”

Zoo TV opened in Florida on February 29th, 1992. If the staging and Bono’s wild get-up weren’t enough indications this was a new U2, the band kicked things off with eight consecutive songs from Achtung Baby. “People went for it,” Bono said to Rolling Stone later that year. “The first show, you just didn’t know. ‘How is this going to go down?’ And they went for it. I think our audiences are smart and that they expect us to push and pull them a bit. They had to swallow blues on Rattle and Hum, for God’s sake! They can take it.”

The tour’s first leg coincided with the 1992 presidential race, and every night from the stage Bono called the White House and asked to speak with President Bush. “Operator Two and I had a great relationship,” Bono said. “She tried not to show it, but I could tell she was very amused, as we rang her night after night.”

Bush never took the call, but a young Arkansas governor was all too happy to talk to the band. U2 met with Bill Clinton in Chicago in September 1992 during the tour and forged what became an enduring relationship. The sitting president was unmoved. “I have nothing against U2,” Bush told a crowd in Bowling Green, Ohio, that month. “You may not know this, but they tried to call me at the White House every night during their concert. But the next time we face a foreign-policy crisis, I will work with John Major and Boris Yeltsin, and Bill Clinton can consult with Boy George.”

For opening acts, U2 chose artists who enhanced the idea of the band as a gathering point for pop music in an increasingly fragmented era – from Public Enemy to the Ramones, Velvet Underground and Pearl Jam. Eddie Vedder was initially skeptical about the scale of Zoo TV, but he came around. “[I eventually] understood that these weren’t decisions they were making out of fashion or simply being clever,” Vedder said. “It was like an edict they’d created as a new philosophy for the group, to really explore the avenues of connecting to people on a large level.”

During a break in early 1993, U2 recorded Zooropa, which took the experiments of Achtung Baby further. When the tour resumed, Bono devised a new character: MacPhisto, a devilish figure with white face paint and horns. “The character was a great device for saying the opposite of what you meant,” said the Edge. “One highlight was calling the minister of fisheries in Norway, young Jan Henri Olsen, to congratulate him on whaling, which was forbidden by the European Union but legal in Norway. He actually took the call and invited Bono to come and have a whale steak with him.”

Those phone calls became a major part of each performance – some nights Bono ordered pizzas for the crowd; on another he rang Madonna on her cellphone (she didn’t pick up). As venues got bigger, U2 kept things intimate by adding a miniset to the show, playing on a tiny stage.

The wall-to-wall video screens also set the scene for every pop spectacle that followed, from Lady Gaga’s Monster Ball to Kanye West’s Glow in the Dark Tour. “Zoo TV wasn’t a set piece, it was a state of mind,” said the Edge. For Bono, the experience was life-changing: “I’ve had to stop ‘not drinking.’ I’ve had to smoke incessantly. I’ve learned to be insincere. I’ve learned to lie. I’ve never felt better!” A.G.

Radiohead at Glastonbury

The scene Radiohead encountered at 1997’s Glastonbury Festival looked more like a war zone than a concert. It had been pouring rain for days, forcing the 90,000 fans at the remote field in Somerset, England, to live like refugees in a monsoon. Two stages sank into the mud, and some fans actually came down with the World War I–era malady trench foot. Early in Radiohead’s set, Thom Yorke’s monitor melted down. The lighting rig was shining directly into his face, meaning he couldn’t see in addition to being unable to hear himself play. “If I’d found the guy who was running the PA system that day,” Yorke told a journalist, “I would have gone backstage and throttled him. Everything was going wrong. Everything blew up.”

Weeks
after releasing their career-defining album, OK Computer, it looked like
Radiohead might flop during a headlining set at the world’s biggest music
festival. Instead, the chaos inspired one of the band’s greatest performances.
Rage poured through Yorke all night long, giving extra fire to eight songs fromOK Computer, plus nearly all of The Bends – and even a crowd-pleasing
version of their first hit, “Creep.” It was a transcendent performance,
even if Yorke didn’t realize it at the time. “I thundered offstage at the
end, really ready to kill,” he said. “And my girlfriend grabbed me,
made me stop, and said, ‘Listen!’ And the crowd were just going wild. It was
amazing.” In 2006, Q magazine voted it the greatest concert in
British history. A.G.

Sleater-Kinney American Tour

In early 1997, the most exciting new band in
rock was a trio of young women driving their own van across the country, with
only their friend Tim along as a roadie. “We’d get to the club,”
recalls Sleater-Kinney singer-guitarist Corin Tucker, “and the sound man
would be like, ‘Wait. You’re the band? You? You girls?'” But playing songs
from its album Dig Me Out, the group bulldozed the staid indie-rock
scene with unbridled punk-rock exuberance. “In Atlanta, 10 women got
onstage and took their shirts off and danced with us,” says co-leader
Carrie Brownstein. “I don’t know if they’d ever felt that freedom before,
and I was really proud to provide the soundtrack for that.” J.D.

Pearl Jam American Tour

By the mid-Nineties, Pearl Jam were in serious
danger of imploding, thanks to intraband tensions and a self-defeating war
against Ticketmaster that had left them almost unable to tour. But they started
over with 1998’s aptly named Yield, their most collaborative album yet,
and when they hit the road with a new drummer, Soundgarden’s Matt Cameron, the
shows fulfilled their promise as one of rock’s all-time great live acts. New
tracks (“Given to Fly,” “Do the Evolution”) were instant
crowd favorites, and classics like “Alive” sounded bigger than ever. “We’re
making up for lost time here,” Eddie Vedder told the crowd one night. “Thanks
for waiting.” A.G.

Phish at Big Cypress

For Phish’s Trey Anastasio, this colossal
one-band festival, at a South Florida Native American reservation, was “the
culmination” of the band’s first run. “Eighty thousand people came
from all over,” he said, “and virtually nothing went wrong.” The
fest’s final set began around midnight, and went on for more than seven hours,
displaying every side of peak Phish, a singular mix of in-joke quirks and
ESP-level improv. Toward the end came an unforgettable take on the “Sunrise”
section of “Also Sprach Zarathustra,” played as the sun actually
rose. “I will never listen to that tape because I know what a letdown it
would be compared to what it was actually like,” Anastasio said. “When
that sun came up, and the sky was blazing pink, it was an indescribable moment.”W.H.

Brian Wilson at the Royal Festival Hall

For decades, Brian Wilson avoided even talking
about Smile, the psychedelic follow-up to the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds he
shelved under the stresses of drug abuse and psychiatric problems. At a 2002 Pet
Sounds show in London, though, someone said to the promoter, “How can
we possibly top this?” The idea of a Smile tour came up. “We
all kind of chuckled,” says Wilson keyboardist Darian Sahanaja. But 20
months later, after poring over the old Smile tapes, Wilson walked onstage
and finally delivered on his decades-old promise of a “teenage symphony to
God,” bringing rock’s most famous unheard album back to life. From the
first celestial harmonies of “Our Prayer” much of the audience was in
tears. Backstage afterward, Wilson was exultant, shouting, “I did it!”A.G.

Daft Punk Alive Tour

In the early aughts, electronic-dance live “performances” were rarely more than one or two dudes nodding their heads around laptops. All that changed at Coachella on April 29th, 2006, when Daft Punk unveiled their genre’s most dazzling musical spectacle. In the overheated, overcrowded darkness of the festival’s Sahara Tent, two helmeted, robot-like figures – Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo – stood inside a 24-foot aluminum pyramid covered in high-intensity LED panels and performed their catalog as a megamix to nearly 40,000 fans. “It was the most synced-up we ever felt,” Bangalter said. What might have been a legendary one-off became a 2007 tour that blew minds across Europe, the U.S., Japan and Australia, inspiring the likes of Skrillex and untold others. W.H.

Leonard Cohen Worldwide Tour

It started as a financial rescue mission. After Leonard Cohen learned, at age 70, that his manager/sometime-lover had absconded with most of his life savings, he realized that his only chance of replenishing his funds was to go on tour. Cohen wasn’t sure how many fans he had left, so he first agreed only to a test run of theater dates in far-flung Canadian towns.

Though he’d never much enjoyed touring, Cohen was a unique ly charismatic live performer. Even those first shows stretched past the two-hour mark, mixing elegant rearrangements of 1960s classics like “Suzanne” and “Bird on the Wire” with more recent tunes like “Waiting for the Miracle” and “Boogie Street.” His voice had deepened considerably, but that only gave it more authority and character. “It’s like he was whispering into your ear,” says longtime backup singer Sharon Robinson.

The shows were spectacular, and word-of-mouth spread quickly. By 2009, Cohen was selling out arenas all over Europe, and eventually he hit 20,000-seaters in America, including Madison Square Garden. The tour eventually ran for 387 shows across five years. Even as he neared his 80th birthday, he kept adding new songs and stretching the running time to three and a half hours, even skipping offstage before the encores. “Leonard was really good at conserving his strength and blocking out distractions and prioritizing his energy,” says Robinson. “He lived an almost monastic lifestyle even though he wasn’t a real monk.”

By
the time he played his final show, in Auckland, New Zealand, Cohen had gone
from cult favorite to cross-generational icon. After he closed that performance
with a sprightly “Save the Last Dance for Me,” he doffed his hat,
took a deep bow and walked off the stage, smiling. “I want to thank you,”
he said to the audience. “Not just for tonight, but for all the years you’ve
paid attention to my songs.” A.G.

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame 25th Anniversary Concert

The idea was to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with no less than the most important multi-artist concert in history. “I knew the anniversary had potency,” said Hall of Fame Foundation chairman (and Rolling Stone founder) Jann Wenner. “I thought that we had earned the right and responsibility to do this thing. It was an opportunity not to be missed.”

The organizers were determined to put on a show that was far more ambitious than any of the previous megashows, while capturing the intimate, collaborative spirit of the annual induction ceremonies and telling the story of rock & roll. “[I kept saying], ‘If this is just miniconcerts of greatest hits, I’m bored,'” recalled co-producer Robbie Robertson. “‘What do we have to offer that you can’t get anywhere else?'”

The shows, held over two nights at New York’s Madison Square Garden, were a rock fan’s dream, with all the artists delivering blistering, unforgettable sets, no doubt inspired by the presence of so many of their peers and the event’s grandeur. Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, who closed the first night, performed at their absolute peak, turning themselves into a soul revue as they backed Billy Joel, John Fogerty, Tom Morello and Darlene Love. U2 brought Springsteen back the next night, but the biggest moment came near the end of their set, when they kicked into “Gimme Shelter,” and – out of nowhere – an unbilled Mick Jagger appeared onstage to the stunned delight of the crowd.

“For a lot of us here, rock & roll means just one word: liberation. Political, sexual, spiritual liberation,” Bono said onstage, before Springsteen interrupted him with the other side of the equation: “Let’s have some fun with it!” A.G.

LCD Soundsystem at Madison Square Garden

“It’s your show,” LCD Soundsystem frontman James Murphy shouted to a sold-out Madison Square Garden. The raging farewell by Murphy’s beloved group was a Last Waltz for New York’s early-’00s dance-rock scene. “I thought it would be really sad,” recalls keyboardist-vocalist Nancy Whang. “But it was just fun. The energy in the room was really charged.” Fans danced to near-exhaustion as LCD played songs from their entire catalog. With barely two months to prepare the nearly four-hour spectacle, featuring a choir, a horn section and a rickety spaceship, the band tackled a production scale beyond its experience. “It was held together with gum and string,” Whang admits. The night (captured in the 2012 film Shut Up and Play the Hits) ended in a snowstorm of balloons, culminating the band’s dream of throwing “the best funeral ever.” W.H.

Jay Z and Kanye West ‘Watch the Throne’ Tour

“I’m sorry if this is your first concert,”
Kanye West said to a Los Angeles crowd on the Watch the Throne tour. “It’s
all downhill from here.” Supporting their triumphal 2011 LP, Watch the
Throne, Jay Z and Kanye convened the greatest superstar summit in hip-hop
history. The pair performed on giant, rising cubes that projected video, and,
when the tour hit Paris, encored with their hit “Niggas in Paris” 12
times in a row. “People just wanted more,” says the tour’s lighting
designer Nick Whitehouse. “It made people crazy.” C.R.W.

Fleetwood Mac ‘On With the Show’ Tour

The return of Christine McVie after 16 years
brought the Mac’s live show to a whole new dimension. Lindsey Buckingham’s
guitar solo on “Go Your Own Way” soared to new heights; Stevie Nicks
seemed possessed during the nightly exorcism of “Rhiannon”; and all
three voices locked seamlessly on “Little Lies.” It was all the magic
of 1977 without the distractions of hard drugs and sexual soap operas. A.G.